Review: Shark Modem for your BlackBerry

I spent the past week in a no wifi or broadband zone at a friend's beach house. I'd forgotten what it's like to live in the stone age like that. The local library has wifi, but only from 10 - 4. I'd much rather sit on the beach than in a library when I'm on vacation. I popped in there one day to search the net for a way to use my BlackBerry as a modem.

I found Shark Modem by Mobishark. They offer a free trial version which gives you up to 10 megabytes of usage before it locks up until you pay them $50. I downloaded it and installed the software on my laptop and BlackBerry. It seemed to work OK although there were a few glitches. I was desperate to get online at night so I took the plunge. They emailed me a registration code and I headed to the beach.

That was pretty much the last time I was able to get it to work sucessfully. Sigh. Their only means of support is online via their website. If I was able to get online I wouldn't need their support!

Each time I tried to connect it would hang. The laptop app would terminate unexpectedly and pop up that silly "tell Microsoft about this problem" box. Meanwhile the BlackBerry side kept dying with "bad DNS address". Every once in a while it would connect to a website and then just when I thought I'd finally got the hang of using it, it would crap out again.

Their user guide is practically useless. Its only mention of the bad DNS address error message is in relation to being a new customer of T-Mobile. I'm an old customer of AT&T. Their "solution" is to wait 5 days for T-Mobile to activate your account. Five days? Are they kidding? The only other suggestion I could find in their sparse documentation was to power off the BlackBerry, pull the battery for 30 seconds, reinsert it, power the BlackBerry back up and try again. That almost never worked, and around the 14th iteration it got old too.

Shark Modem is the fail. Don't waste your money.

Posted at 17:31 by Chris Wysocki   [/reviews]   Comments | Perm Link |   |   Tweet